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August 16, 2006

About a month ago now I went on a road trip with my wife, son, and parents. The impetus for the entire trip was a statement I made: “Ever since I was a little kid I’ve wanted to see that place where they built a building over all those dinosaur fossils in the cliff side.”

That place turns out to be the quarry at the aptly named Dinosaur National Monument, located near the city of Vernal, Utah.

May 11, 2006

Thought I'd come out of hibernation real quick to make sure you're all aware of something: Dan Brown's book "The Da Vinci Code" is a load of ridiculous drivel. It is not "historical ficton". It is fiction based on lies based on fiction.

Dan Brown claims in his book that the Dead Sea scrolls are early Christian writings and invalidate the gospels in the Bible. In actuality, the Dead Sea scrolls predate the birth of Christ and have nothing to do with the New Testament, so Dan's statement of "truth" is an outright lie. He also claims that the Dead Sea scrolls were originally discovered in the 1950s. Try Googling the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is common knowledge that they were first discovered in 1947. Did this man do ANY research?

But my favorite error in The Da Vinci Code is when one of the characters claims that a reference in the gospel of Philip proves that Mary was Jesus' wife. The character says, "As any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion, in those days, literally meant spouse". Sorry Dan. The gospel of Philip (which is itself a known fake) was written in Coptic, not Aramaic, and the word for "companion" in Coptic literally means "companion".

It always intrigues me to see how quickly someone who hates Christianity will latch on to any silly conspiracy theory that proposes to invalidate it. Case in point: Any theories about Christ having a relationship with Mary Magdalene are groundlessly extrapolated from late texts (third century or later) that are known to be bogus...that's why they're not in the Bible. So while people discount what the Bible says about Christ -- even though most of it can be dated to within 50 years of his crucifixion and is known to be faithful to the original writing -- they'll readily accept absurd plots from texts written by kooks pretending to be Christ's contemporaries centuries later.

You have no idea how sick I am of hearing people say, "It's just a good mystery novel." No, it's not. It tells a fictional story while pretending to reveal the "fact" that Jesus Christ ran off to Europe and had a child with Mary Magdalene. So at best it is "just a good mystery novel that directly attacks the deity of Christ."

Oh, I see. No harm done, then.

I'm not really concerned that this movie will damage anyone's faith, though. My thinking is this: If you already think Christianity is a joke, you'll see this movie as validation of your beliefs. If you don't often use your brain, you might like the movie and just keep living in ignorance. And if you're a Christian, hopefully you'll just dismiss it for the nonsense it is and get on with your life.

February 02, 2006

This post is my submission for the "Faith" edition of the Blog Carnival.

Many atheists reveal that their main obstacle to belief is their revulsion to the concept of faith. Not a revulsion to reasonable, everyday faith (like sitting in a chair and believing it will hold you up), but specifically to faith in an unseen, intelligent creator of the universe.

It's an understandable objection. I'm disgusted with the beliefs of many people in my own church on the subject. Very few who claim to be Christians have any interest in subjecting their beliefs to scrutiny of any kind, and some end up elevating faith to a form of deity all its own. Faith then becomes a force we can utilize to shape our own destinies. Many evangelists (especially the TV kind) would lead you to believe that if you would only have enough faith and "speak positive words into your life" then nothing bad would ever happen to you.

Of course, this philosophy cannot stand up under even the slightest actual examination of Jewish or Christian scripture, but that's of no concern to "Word of Faith" followers. It's the religious equivalent of a get rich quick scheme. "Don't bore me with doctrine. I'm only interested in what makes me feel good about myself. And if I get results, what I believe must be correct."

So this oft held pseudo-Christian concept of faith has admittedly earned much of the distain Christianity as a whole receives from atheists. However, a philosophy cannot logically be judged by the actions and beliefs of those who claim to follow it.

I believe that the faith the Bible calls Christians to have is one based in sound reason, not in unquestioning acceptance.

The more science discovers in the pursuit of truth, the more convincing the evidence for a God becomes. In the past century we've gone from believing that the universe has eternally existed to all but proving that the universe had a definite beginning. Of course, if a creator does exist then this is exactly what one would expect to discover.

Science must deal with what is measurable and observable. This logically includes anything within our universe, and at the same time excludes anything that might exist outside of it. Therefore, any theory about what might exist beyond our scope of observation is pure speculation with no hope of ever being proven through research.

The consequence of this fact is obvious: All theories about what caused the Big Bang that began our universe -- whether it is a god, an extra-dimensional infinite universe generator, a Big Crunch, or even a spaghetti monster -- are inescapably unscientific. Ironically, this unanswerable question is the most profoundly important question in science. In fact, the pursuit of this question looms as the very foundation of science itself.

So how can we approach it? To hold any convictions about the origin of the universe requires faith in that which is unseen and unmeasurable. Since that is the case, only logic -- not evidence -- can guide us to a feasible conclusion.

We know that our universe cannot have always existed. Not only could the cosmos not have passed through an infinite number of moments to reach any specific point in time (i.e. "now"), but the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the universe would have dispersed all of its energy an eternity ago. Our universe would be cold, dark, and lifeless.

If we say that the Big Bang was preceded by a Big Crunch, that merely begs the question. It's as pointless as theorizing that life on Earth was created by aliens. You are then forced to ask, "Who created the aliens?" A universal cycle of expansion and contraction cannot have been occurring for an infinite length of time for the same reasons I stated in the last paragraph, so we must also rule out this "oscillatory universe" theory.

How about some sort of extra-dimensional "universe generator", churning out an infinite number of possible universes that exist parallel to each other? Okay. I have no problem with that idea. But where did it come from? What created the "universe creator" with such a purpose? Might there just as easily be a "'Universe creator' creator"?

Hopefully you're beginning to see the problem. No matter what natural explanation we invent to explain the origin of the universe, the need for a cause behind the cause always arises. Why?

Here are two things that we know to be true logically:

1) Every event ever observed has had a cause.2) Every decision originates in a mind.

The universe as we know it is the product of a chain of causes. At the beginning of this chain sits an explosion that resulted in the existence of everything we know -- matter, energy, even time itself. By necessity this explosion had to be caused by something, and as I have already demonstrated, it is not logical to assume that this cause was something else of which the same question must be asked. So an uncaused cause must exist at the root of all things. And the only logical uncaused cause must be capable of making the decision to create our universe at a specific, measurable point in time. Therefore, the only logical uncaused cause must be a transcendent intelligence.

If you just experienced a negative knee-jerk reaction to that statement, I urge you to ask yourself why. Is your objection like Einstein's initial objection to the Big Bang; that it sounds too much like the God of Christianity being forced into the realm of science? By no means should we appeal to the miraculous in order to explain away causes we have not yet discovered in our universe, but we are not speaking of a gap in understanding. We are speaking of the event that created understanding, time, physicality, and ultimately our capacity for pondering these things in the first place.

So ask yourself, "Which faith is more reasonable?": Faith that our amazing universe -- full of staggering complexity built upon profound simplicity, with life arising and thriving seemingly in defiance of every natural law -- has a purpose, and that the need for an uncaused cause is inescapable, or faith that the existence of our universe is pure happenstance, a cosmic accident; that every beautiful thing we observe that leaves us awe-stricken is without meaning or value, and that defying all logic and reason our universe burst into existence with no cause whatsoever?

Barring empirical evidence to support either faith, I have to go with the faith that logic leads me to hold.

January 26, 2006

Television used to represent a sort of alternate reality in which Christians were never seen or heard. I didn’t have too much of a problem with that. But now days it seems increasingly popular to feature guest characters who portray Christians as disingenuous, ignorant, or intolerant.

For example, a recent episode of E.R. one of the characters – a lesbian – was reunited with her mother after having been given up for adoption as a child. Her mother was touring with a Christian singing group and stopped by to meet her. When the mother discovered her daughter was a lesbian, she was appalled. Later in the episode she attempted to reconcile with the daughter by saying that she loved her anyway. The daughter threw it back in her face, saying, “I don’t want your love without your acceptance”.

Think about what she is saying for a moment. The daughter didn’t want her mother’s love unless she would also accept her choice to live a homosexual lifestyle. However, the daughter was equally unable to accept her mother for her beliefs, which told her that homosexuality was a sin that cannot be condoned.

So, who’s the hypocrite here? Of course, we are expected to side with the daughter, and the lesson learned is supposed to be that we should not only love everyone but embrace everyone for their beliefs, no matter how much we personally disagree with them. Instead, a viewer paying attention will merely learn that people are quick to dismiss Christians as “a bunch of hypocrites,” not realizing that in saying so they are merely revealing the hypocrisy in themselves.

Another example was on an episode of "Bones." A DJ was found dead and appeared to have overdosed on methamphetamines. As it turns out, he had been framed, and was a Christian DJ. His father, defending his son, says something along the lines of, “My son didn’t do drugs. He was a good kid. I taught him to have a personal relationship with Jesus. Do you understand what I’m saying? A personal relationship! Look at this plaster cast of his hands he made as a boy. When he was young, I took this to a palm reader, and she said she didn’t see any evil in these hands. So please, find the killer.”

What? In one breath you talk about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and about consulting a palm reader? Who writes this stuff?

The father also makes some cheesy comment about “iniquity” being a “Bible word”. Uhhh…actually, it’s just an archaic English word. Unless you believe the Bible to have been originally written in King James English.

But the latest and most annoying example of Christian portrayal on Television was this past week on “Lost”. The character Eko is a Catholic priest. He tells the character Claire that her baby needs to be baptized. He says, “Do you know what baptism means?” to which she replies, “It makes it so you get into heaven”. He smiles in response. I expected him to correct her, pointing out that no just God would send someone to hell for not having water ritualistically dumped on their head. But instead, he validates her statement.

Then he says this, “When John baptized Jesus, it is said that the heavens opened up and a dove came down. This told John something. It told him that he had just cleansed this man of all his sins.” After this he baptized both the mother and the baby.

Now, I don’t care what denomination a Christian comes from: No Christian believes that Christ was baptized in order to be forgiven of his sins. Christ was equally God and man. He committed no sin. These are basic and essential tenets of Christianity. Besides, when Jesus approaches John for baptism, John says, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world”, says that he isn’t even fit to untie Jesus’ sandal, and that Jesus should instead be baptizing him. And even when John is baptising others, he makes it clear that baptism is a sign of repentance, not an act that grants salvation from sin.

So I wonder: Is it that hard for the script writers on these shows to find somebody in Hollywood to consult with who has at least opened the Bible before having characters pretend to share what it says? Could be. But I’d rather Christians not be represented on television at all than be portrayed as a pack of hypocrites and superstitious fools.

September 27, 2005

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has become all the rage across the Internet. It started out as a satirical letter to the Kansas School Board, demanding that they give equal time in schools to Spaghetti Monsterism if they are going to give time to the theory of Intelligent Design. Naturalistic Materialists worldwide have lauded it as if it has blown the lid off the idiocy that “those hicks in Kansas” have been trying to shove down kids’ throats.

It’s marginally cute and clever for a college graduate's statement about his belief that science must by necessity exclude the idea of a God (unless, of course, God is real, in which case excluding him would be the most grievous error possible...but I digress). However, its success can be mostly attributed to a public lack of understanding of what Intelligent Design really is. Well, that and the fact that there are a lot of people out there who will swallow up anything that makes fun of organized religion, if only just because it makes their mommy mad.

Opponents of Intelligent Design (ID) begin with a strawman and work from there. The strawman is this: “ID is merely Biblical Young-Earth Creationism repackaged for the science classroom.” This is completely untrue. Many supporters of ID (including myself) find Young Earth Creationism to be rooted in ignorance of both science and scripture. It also makes Christians look like idiots in the eyes of many.

Intelligent Design merely calls into question Darwinian Evolution due to the overwhelming lack of concrete evidence, and suggests that the odds against even the simplest forms of life arising out of the total disorder that our universe WANTS to be in are too great. Too much faith in random chance (which is actually not a thing or a force that one can logically have faith in, but instead is just a measure of probability) is required to give Evolution any credence based on what we currently know. In fact, the difficulties facing a naturalistic worldview only get worse with each new discovery.

ID makes no claim as to who the intelligent designer might be or how he might have created life. You could believe it to be aliens, creatures from another dimension, Yahweh of the Bible, and yes, even a Flying Spaghetti Monster. So the Spaghetti Monster has already earned equal time in Kansas schools right along side the One True God…his prophet is just too blind to realize it.

Intelligent Design is important to the future of science. It is seeing to it that the outdated theory of evolution is examined as the flawed theory that it is, with no evidence to support it except homology. And homology (similarity among types) does not prove correlation. A spoon, a saucepan, and a kettle are homologous. That doesn’t mean the spoon begat the saucepan. They all simply utilize the same useful features. This is all that homology tells us definitively about the diversity of life.

Darwin admitted that his theory would require future fossil finds to show better correlation between species than simple homology. He truly believed that the fossil record would vindicate him. Instead, it has only increased the amount of diversity we know of, and has never produced a single verifiable “missing link”. Darwin said that any irreducible system that couldn’t be explained through natural selection would be devastating to his theory, while he believed cells to be “disorganized blobs of jelly". We now know that cells are amazingly complex and organized machines, with tiny motors, gear systems, and data replication facilities far superior to anything mankind can create. In short, Darwin was WRONG about many things his theory's success hinged on (not to mention the fact that he believed Blacks to be genetically inferior to Whites and that they would eventually be wiped out through natural selection).

So perhaps the most important thing about Intelligent Design is that it calls Evolution as we know it into question. Allowing ID to be discussed in schools merely encourages future scientists to not take the word of Darwin as gospel and to explore other, better explanations as to why life exists.

June 06, 2005

I created this T-shirt design for the ongoing T-shirt contest at Threadless.com. Please click on the link below before June 13th, 2005 and vote for my design! Also, be sure to check the "I would buy it" box to the left of the voting field if you really think you would. Comment and let me know what you think!

June 01, 2005

I’ve been getting a lot of flak for saying that “Revenge of the Sith” was for the most part a steaming pile, but it seems I’m in good company. Although my review focused more on the movie’s failure to adequately complete the story, I’m glad to see that others noticed the absurdity of Obi-Wan’s “Only a Sith deals in absolutes” remark. Take this excerpt from the article “No Faith in This Force” by Orson Scott Card (yes, that guy who wrote “Ender’s Game”):

But in a pivotal scene, Obi-Wan says what amounts to the same thing: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

Isn’t that odd? The only thing both sides agree on is that people who believe in absolute good and evil are bad!

I suspect that Lucas realized, after writing "Good is a point of view," that all his friends actually believed that. So he had to make it clear that moral relativism was the right way after all—so he had Obi-Wan say that absolutism was a Sith thing, even though in the actual story, the best of the Jedis show an unbending commitment to absolute Good.

It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it.

May 19, 2005

I have said all through the prequel Star Wars Trilogy that I would reserve judgment until the story had been completed. I have been one of George Lucas’ most committed defenders. After all, it’s his story for him to tell as he sees fit. Well, this morning at 2:30 AM I finished watching the final installment. After twenty-seven years of wondering how these events had transpired, the wait was finally over.

I was disappointed.

I know the day after is probably too early for me to really make a fair judgment. I was tired and feeling especially cynical as I watched the movie…I couldn’t seem to get myself out of “critique mode”, but at the moment I feel like I waited twenty-seven years expecting a present, only to be patronized and slapped in the face.

Below are spoilers. I’ll now invoke the standard web notification of this fact.

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SPOILER ALERT!!!
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Here are my major qualms with the film.

Anakin turned to the dark side because he had a dream in which Padme died in childbirth. The problem with this is that she only died in childbirth because he joined the darkside in order to find a way to save her because he had the dream! That’s a paradox. The fact that he saw the vision couldn’t be the cause of the vision coming to pass.

Secondly, too much of the movie was spent watching sweeping shots of landscape as ships landed and took off. Like in Episode II, action scenes were separated by dry and mostly unnecessary dialogue. And compared to the duels in Episode I and II, the choreography in this film was incredibly sloppy. There were very few “wow” moments where someone did something amazing. Often, in fact, it looked like characters had no idea how to hold a sword (Dooku, Palpatine, and Windu).

There was no reason to include Kashyyyk in this film other than to show us some wookies. It was a pointless diversion. Although I did enjoy it, it had absolutely no bearing on the plot. When you’ve got so much story to tell and only two hours to do it in, your time might be better spent elsewhere.

In the end, Owen and Beru Lars stare off into the sunset immediately after being handed baby Luke. Why? What are they looking at that’s so important? Is this just the standard sunset procedure for Tatooinians? How forcedly-melodramatic can you get? I personally think the movie should have ended on a shot of Vader and Sidious standing in a hall filled with devoted followers…sort of an anti-medal ceremony from Episode IV.

But the greatest offense this movie makes in my opinion is the pervasiveness of moral relativism. It seems like Lucas waited until he had nothing to lose before he decided to shove his ill-conceived worldview down our throats completely. Even the opening scroll tries to tell us that there really are no good guys and bad guys…just different choices and points of view.

This horribly bankrupt philosophy comes to a head when Anakin says to Obi-Wan, “If you are not my friend, then you are my enemy.” This is almost a direct quote of Jesus Christ from Matthew 12:30. And how does Obi-Wan respond?

“Only the Sith speak in absolutes.”

In other words, Anakin (and by extension, Jesus) was the worst kind of evil because he believed in absolutes. If I were Anakin, my reply would have been, “Are you absolutely sure of that, Obi-Wan?”

The Star Wars universe is one in which the battle lines have always been clearly drawn between Light and Dark. Does Lucas really expect us to swallow a relativistic paradigm within the framework of his dualistic universe? It’s absurd. Stick to the special effects shots, George. Leave religion and ethics to somebody who has a clue what they’re talking about.

Alright, look. In order to make an accurate prequel, Lucas had a very short list of things he had to show us in order to maintain continuity based on dialogue spoken by characters in the original trilogy. He succeeded in showing us that Anakin was a great pilot before he met Obi-Wan and that they did fight together in the Clone Wars. Beyond that, he failed to accurately sync the movies up with these lines:

1) Obi-Wan: “Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force.”
Was he? It looks to me more like Palpatine tricked him into taking the dark path. Anakin signed up based on the belief that he would be saving his wife from the future he saw in a vision and serving the greater good by stopping the “power hungry Jedi” from taking over. Palpatine orchestrated a situation in which it looked as if Mace Windu was attacking him out of pure greed, and Anakin made a rash decision. This turned him into a raging monster who would slaughter children on command? I don’t buy it.

2) Obi-Wan: “…and he was a good friend.”
Was he? The movies do not show Anakin and Obi-Wan ever really getting along. Mostly Anakin is defying Obi-Wan or complaining about the way he treats him, and Obi-Wan is often condescending (Especially in Episode II).

3) Obi-Wan: “Vader hunted down and murdered the Jedi.”
No, turns out he didn’t hunt down or murder any Jedi. He simply killed a bunch of Jedi-in-training children who were left helpless in the temple. The Clone Troopers killed most of the Jedi, and Palpatine killed the rest.

4) Luke: “What do you remember of your Mother?” Leia: “Mostly images, really. My mother died when I was very young. She was very beautiful, but sad.”
Up until Lucas killed Padme in childbirth, who would have assumed that this speech was about Leia’s adoptive mother on Alderaan? Of course, this wasn’t his original intention when he wrote Return of the Jedi. Padme would be the mother with cause to be sad, and there would be no point in mentioning that her adoptive mother died when she was young. Lucas fudged it in the prequel because he couldn’t figure out how to pull it off, I guess. Still, the juxtaposition of Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader with Padme giving birth was pretty cool.

In my mind, there are several things that could have made this movie much better. A more believable fall for Anakin, Qui-Gon appearing as a Jedi spirit instead of just being spoken of by Yoda (which would have still been a deus ex machina anyway), seeing Yoda arrive on Dagobah, and maybe Vader in his suit doing SOMETHING other than give the stereotypical “scream of mental anguish” and looking out a window.

I’m being very critical, I know that. It’s just a movie, I also know that. It was an okay film, and I might even come to really enjoy it with time and subsequent viewings, but with a little more effort on the part of George Lucas I think this had potential to easily be the best movie of the six. As it stands today, I think I need to watch The Empire Strikes Back, if only just to remind myself why I fell in love with this series in the first place.

October 15, 2004

Before about 1994, the general public didn’t know anything about “The Internet” or “World Wide Web”. The most techno-savvy among us had a 28.8k modem and made physical phone calls to computer systems known as Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes for short). These were isolated computers in homes and businesses around the world that were made available for the purpose of conversing, sharing files, and playing turn-based games. These systems were not graphic-based. You navigated via a command line interface, browsed directories, and downloaded files to your computer. Any graphics you saw were generated with primitive ANSI code.

When modems first came around in the early 80s they consisted of two little rubber cuffs that you slipped your phone’s handset onto. Your phone sent and received organized noise (modulated/demodulated = modem) to communicate.

I had a 300 baud modem on my Commodore 64. It was so slow that you had to wait for text to appear on the screen. From there, the modem speeds increased as technology improved like this: 1200, 2400, 9600, 14.4k, 28k, 56k. The signal limitations of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines prohibited advancements further than this for standard modem communication.

You could buy magazines (basically BBS yellow pages) that were full of different BBSes you could call. Most numbers didn’t work, and when you did get a bite you could look forward to waiting 10 minutes to download a low resolution graphic of the USS Enterprise to show off to all your friends.

BBSes were virtually unmonitored and operated outside the law, unlike the Internet. For example, I knew of one BBS in Florida that would allow you to download freshly pirated games for a month in exchange for a $20 bill mailed inside a blank greeting card. Not that I ever did such a thing…

The first massively multiplayer online RPG I ever played was not Ultima Online or Everquest. It was called “Club Caribe”: A LucasArts game for the Commodore 64. Built on a modified “Maniac Mansion” engine, you walked around this virtual world and interacted with other players. It was extremely expensive to play in a small town like Ada, Oklahoma, since you had to dial a long distance phone number in addition to paying the game’s monthly fee. My friend James had it, but we didn’t get to play it much. The concept, however, really blew me away. This wasn’t a leveling treadmill or an endless dungeon crawl. You talked to people and maybe played an occasional game of checkers. The simple novelty of interaction via computer was enough to keep people fixated.

September 02, 2004

I don’t know how it is where you live, but people around here don’t know the difference between a cicada and a locust. It seems trivial, I know, but it’s really like comparing nuns to Nazis. So let me spell it out for you.

Locusts are basically identical to grasshoppers when alone, but when a bunch of them get together they form a swarm and devastate crops as they migrate over huge distances. They’re destructive pests, and nobody has ever considered them friends (check the Bible if you doubt me).

Cicadas, however, have a completely different story. There are many different varieties of cicadas. They all live underground for most of their lives, but each species stays buried for a different number of years (5, 7, 11, 17, etc.). I’ll use the 17-year cicada as an example of how they live. Try to stick with me…it’s not quite as boring as it may sound.

In mid-late June, adult female cicadas plant their eggs deep in the 2-3 year old shoots of a host tree. They continue to move down the stem planting more eggs in rows for quite a while. These eggs hatch in August and the newly emerged nymphs drop to the soil and burrow in to the ground near the tree where they feed on roots for the next 17 years.

Around April of the emergence year the nearly mature nymphs will tunnel to the surface once the soil has thawed and warmed. Then they will go back down about a foot for another month. The purpose of tunneling to the surface in April is to construct an emergence hole while the soil is still moist, because they know they can’t count on the ground being soft when the time is right. In early June the nymphs emerge in large numbers and crawl up onto any available surface. There they will shed their skin, dry out their new wings, and consider themselves adults.

Male cicadas “sing” in the evenings for most of the summer. They don’t make their music by rubbing their legs against their wings like locusts or grasshoppers do. Instead, they force air through a specialized organ in their abdomen.

Cicadas carry out a highly specialized “job”. Their life cycle actually benefits healthy trees by providing a natural pruning of their branches and roots every 17 years, and aerates the soil in the process.

So lets think about this for a second. Remember that if any individual part of this life cycle wasn’t inherent in the very first cicada ever, it would have died immediately and never been able to reproduce. This is just further evidence that macroevolution is a fantasy. There is virtually no evidence to support it…merely a dogmatic adherence to Darwin’s theory -- which, by the way, he himself admitted could not stand on its own and would have to be supported by fossil evidence that had not yet been discovered. Well, 150 years later we’ve found millions of new fossils that simply complicate his lack of evidence. There are many more types of prehistoric creatures than he had surmised, and none of them represent transitional forms or show the broadening of species variation over time. In fact, we basically see all major phyla appearing suddenly in the fossil record with no explanation as to where they came from.

Ummm…so anyway…all I was really trying to say is that a locust is nothing like a cicada. I guess that post got a little out of hand.

Favorite Books

Ravi Zacharias: Can Man Live Without God?An amazing book that makes the case for God not by citing the Bible or great theologians, but by analyzing the philosophies of famous atheists and showing their flaws.

C. S. Lewis: Mere ChristianityC.S. Lewis was an atheist for much of his life. Appropriately, this book makes the case for the existance of God first and Christianity second with carefully outlined and surprisingly simple reasoning. I consider this required reading for anyone searching for meaning.

C. S. Lewis: Space TrilogyReligious Sci-Fi Fantasy: A very tiny genre. In "Out of the Silent Planet", "Perelandra", and "That Hiddeous Strength", C.S. Lewis manages to tackle difficult theological questions as we follow Dr. Ransom in his adventures on Mars, Venus, and back on Earth. My favorite science fiction series by far.